Vinson Massif: Dave & Team Carry to High Camp

It is a quarter after one in the morning in the Ellsworth Mountains of Antarctica. We made our carry of summit supplies to Vinson high camp today. It all went quite well. We made it up there in under six hours, arriving just before 8 PM. Two-and-a-half hours later we were back down the fixed ropes and thirty-five hundred feet lower in camp one. These are late days, but we are simply trying to use the best sun of the day. In such cold temperatures it doesn’t make sense to do otherwise. Our storm is gone, but there is still a lot of high cloud in the area. We were warm enough going up the fixed ropes but met with a nagging four mile per hour breeze on the less steep slopes before high camp and that allowed us to fully appreciate the ambient temperature (forecast to be -24 C today with about -35 C at the summit) It was all good training for the bigger and harder days which will follow. Climbing out of the Branscomb valley, the team got to look out upon the endless world of ice to our west today. It is a stunning and magnificent view, and virtually impossible to tell where ice ends and sky begins.